Thursday, July 22, 2010

From the euroblog circuit: EU arbiter upholds the decision of a Dutch court to prevent coffee shops from selling to foreigners. (I'd like to see them try to enforce it, by the way, and then see what happens to tourist revenue.) My response: I understand why, to overturn the decision would effectively open up the Common Market for free trade in cannabis, but in a general legislative sense it's still Wrong(tm). In fact, it's legally tantamount to Denmark preventing its newspapers from publishing Muhammed cartoons drawn by exiled Iranians.

Because in both cases, it's being done to prevent visitors to your country from being stoned to death.

(Badum-tscht. Look, it was either this, or put that joke in my standup routine, and those people are actually paying for a ticket.)

Disclaimer: My personal position on weed is that as long as alcohol and tobacco are legal, banning soft drugs is just disingenuous; and empirically, people get into far less trouble on weed than they do on Jägermeister.